Random ramblings…

My friend shac put up a hilarious list of why he hasn’t been blogging lately. I think every other one applies to me, and I’d replace them with “finishing MBA at Berkeley” and “playing with my 15 month old daughter”. Man, I can’t believe its been that long…

Anyways, still swimming…and Twittering…a lot…out of the time zone much to shac’s chagrin.

FriendFeed is a cool new site that aggregates you and your friend’s recent activity on numerous social networking sites (and even things not strictly considered social networks). Its nice because its a newsfeed that integrates all those minor pings your friends post and lets you keep up with them in an easy-to-read chronological way.

Before my recent trip to India I wanted to pick up some entertainment for the plane. So in addition to four laptop batteries and a Magsafe adapter for the plane I picked up a few games. I don’t play a ton of computer games, but can definitely be engrossed under the right circumstances. Being stuck in transit for 36 hours is one of those circumstances. Oh yeah, I’m on a Mac, so gaming selections can be somewhat limited.

I ordered a copy of Homeworld 2, knowing that Homeworld was considered one of the best games of the decade by friends of mine (the original was not available on OSX). Unfortunately, something went wrong on the installation during my flight so I couldn’t get it to work. Maybe I’ll return this one…

The really good find was a few titles from Ambrosia Software. They make/port small titles for the Mac, and focus on “medium-sized” games. By medium-size I generally mean something that’s more involved than a simple shoot-em-up but that I can still learn and play a couple of rounds on on a plane flight. In particular, I found DEFCON and SketchFighter to be a blast.

DEFCON is great if you grew up in the 80s and love “War Games”. A strategic role playing game where essentially, “Everyone Dies”. The graphics in particular are fantastic and is sure to draw strange looks from your neighbors on any plane.

SketchFighter is on the smaller arcade-style for a game, but the concept and the graphics are great so its just simply fun to play.

Two other games they had that looked fun included EV Nova (sci-fi role playing I imagine to be like Homeworld…but I guess I can’t compare), and Darwinia (which I really couldn’t figure out).

If you’re looking for some quick entertainment for your Mac check out Ambrosia, its always good to support smaller publishers.

One of my best friends works for Linden Labs, the company behind Q107’s media darling Second Life. For those of you who haven’t heard, Second Life is essentially the Metaverse as visualized by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, a completely virtual world where people can create a live whatever they want. Always a neat idea for hackers, but like most technology, the initial usages revolved around geeks and porn.

I’m excited to see this start changing though, as I knew it would when they added voice capabilities. Now the world would go from being IRC with avatars to a real virtual world where people could interact more naturally.

I was particularly happy to see this post on the every-influential TechCrunch talking about the greater utility of the virtual world, and reversing their previous stance “that this year Second Life has provided a range of tabloid fodder that we’ve seen fit to print”.

Go Linden, here’s hoping you figure out a business model that will at least let you stay alive, if not make the extremely passionate people who have built this amazing technology at least somewhat rich.

Update 10/14/07: Someone pointed out that it was Neal Stephenson, not William Gibson who wrote Snow Crash…do’oh!